IN THE ’70s, he was a transgressive poet, covering the darker aspects of underground life that bloated utopians like Allen Ginsberg wouldn’t dare go near, even with a large entourage of sycophants to protect them. In the ’80s he was a tweaker/pornographer, constructing elaborately nasty death-porn like a spun Marquis de Sade. And at some point in the ’90s, Dennis Cooper became one of the only living writers worth reading. Now, while semi-fakes like Irvine Welsh jump all over him with poorly phrased praise, Dennis Cooper quietly toils on in the construction of a new fiction.

Dennis Cooper is an anomaly in the sex/drugs/art world. Most artists who mine similar territory usually make their statement early (Jim Carroll), and then spend the rest of their lives coasting on their success (Hunter S. Thompson), lazily recapitulating their original statement (William S. Burroughs), maintaining their credibility by trying to link up with younger, more vital artists (burnout/sellout Gus Van Sant trying to cuddle with Harmony Korine). Whereas Dennis Cooper only gets better, and seems to be peaking after the age of 40.

After his biggest excess, 1991’s Frisk, which took his fantasies to a new plateau of sickness, the emphasis of Cooper’s work shifted from probing the limits of his evil imagination, to how his evil imagination fit into the world, and how the world fit into his evil imagination. His latest work explores the pleasures and perils of living inside your head in an increasingly fragmented culture.

1994’s Try explored new emotional terrain for Cooper, describing a chaste and innocent love affair buried beneath brutality and abuse. By using such material (kiddie porn, murder, child molestation, heroin addiction), he was able to display a vulnerability that would be cloying in any other context.

With his last novel, Guide, Cooper gained entrance to my pantheon of great writers (along with Nabokov and a measly few others). It is the only novel of the ’90s I’ve read more than once, because it encapsulates a period of time (mid-’90s urban existence) that no other writer has dared to approach. Not quite a novel, not quite a memoir, it transcends both, and achieves the “more real than realism” degree of total accuracy, every word simultaneously comic and tragic.

So what role does All Ears, a collection of cultural eavesdropping, play in all of this? Well, not quite a main course, it’s Dennis Cooper version 4.5, or a short but solid EP that a great band would put out between albums. At 146 pages, it reads really fast and fades very quickly, but like a line of good coke, it was fun while it lasted.

The first article, “AIDS: Words from the Front,” is the best, and the one that most resembles his fiction. It details his encounter with Jason, an AIDS-stricken gutterpunk, Katie, his junkie girlfriend, and Bouncer, their teenage hustler friend, whose services Cooper employs. It’s very sad and very true. In a strange instance of life/art collision, this article also serves as the basis for a chapter in Guide, in which he consolidates Jason and Bouncer into one idealized composite, and then scrambles a bit with his fantasies. It’s a tiny key to that book’s mystery.

Another skill revealed in All Ears is Cooper’s facility as an interviewer. He disarms his subjects with confessional honesty, by approaching them on their level, and gets them to talk as they would to a friend. This is your chance to see the celebrities naked, to hear Keanu brag naively about wanting to be a speedfreak, to hear Leo share his thoughts on Rimbaud and John Waters, to hear Steve Malkmus at his most lucid (i.e., least cryptic). When getting Courtney Love to talk more shit than she normally does, or escorting Bob Mould out of the closet, Cooper takes you far closer to what feels like “the truth” than almost any journalist.

All Ears ends very harshly, with a shotgun reassessment of William S. Burroughs, which begins by asking, “Why is his death such a curiously uneventful event?” Where Rolling Stone and others just ran with the stampede, Cooper kicks a dead horse, calling the corpse on its bullshit. Burroughs gets taken on for his irresponsible delight in being the glamorous, heroin-poster old man, and for letting his handlers run his life — even writing his final books for him — while he nodded off, Cooper claims. The book ends with its biggest question mark, something for you to wonder about while you wait for his next novel, Period.